The Next Great American Novel

by Jenny Hubbard  Rowan Public Library
               
One of the reasons I read is to help clear the clouds from my brain.  Due to recent national events, the skies there are overcast, grayer than usual. I’m baffled.  Given all that our country has endured, how is it possible that the institution of racism still finds a home on our soil? 

Just last week, I checked out from Rowan Public Library a novel recommended to me by my sister Leigh—Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi.  Usually I turn to non-fiction to supply me with causes and reasons, reserving fiction for pleasure, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment, but this is the rare book that delivers all of the above. To call Homegoing (as it has been called by people way more credible than I) a great American novel is to catalogue it alongside Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huckleberry Finn; and certainly, it deserves to stand in that company.  It has earned big honors, top awards. But I would argue that Gyasi’s masterpiece reaches beyond what Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, and Mark Twain have said about the institution of race.  It reaches beyond by stretching back, all the way back, to the beginning of slave trade in Africa.

The novel covers 300 years in 300 pages, so the pace is swift, yet the writing is clear as a bell:  “This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection. Quey would never go to Cudjo’s village.  He would not be weak.  He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made.”  And in a later chapter we get this:  “For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go.”

At the start of the book is a family tree to help us follow the descendants of two half-sisters born in the eighteenth century.  Gyasi gives each generation its voice, and while she could end on a note of despair, she chooses instead an uplifting image: two modern-day academics, a young man from one family line and a young woman from the other, in love and swimming together at the Ghanaian shore where their roots lie buried.  Without melodramatizing or preaching, Gyasi, a young woman born in Ghana and raised in Alabama, led me to a clearer understanding of why racism in America is so complicated and why it’s still here.  It takes more than love to conquer hate, Gyasi seems to be saying.  It takes knowledge—and acknowledgment.